Defeating the trolls

I'm a firm believer in the idea that most people, most of the time, are trying as hard as they can to do the right thing.

Yes, we often differ about what that right thing is.  Yes, sometimes we try and fail.  But my point is, we are usually working to do the best we can for ourselves and our loved ones.

But.

There is a minority of people who, to put it bluntly, are assholes.  These are the people who can't stand it if others get recognition, are furious when their pet ideas turn out to be wrong, or are simply spiteful and nasty.  And that ugly minority can, unfortunately, be extremely loud at times.

Look at what happened last week to Dr. Katie Bouman, the astrophysicist who spearheaded the project to generate the world's first actual photograph of a black hole.

You'd think that anyone with a scientific bent would have been thrilled, both for her and because of the extraordinary image she helped create.  And honestly, most of us were.  But there was a handful of trolls who couldn't stand the fact that she was getting accolades for her work -- and that she showed great modesty in highlighting the work of the rest of her team.

"No one algorithm or person made this image," Dr. Bouman wrote.  "It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.  It has been truly an honor, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all."

So said trolls decided that this was Dr. Bouman's way of admitting she really hadn't had much to do with the research, and set out to destroy her reputation.

Fake Twitter accounts and YouTube channels started popping up, all with the aim of casting doubt on her role in the project.  Many of them focused on her colleague Andrew Chael, who it was implied had done nearly all the research, which was then swiped by Bouman.  Chael himself was having none of it; he posted on Twitter a complete disavowal of the claim, and a demand that the attacks on Dr. Bouman stop.

The trolls then created a fake account in Chael's name and accelerated the nastiness.

Nota bene: if your opinion about something is on such shaky ground that in order to get people to believe it, you have to create a fake Twitter account, impersonate someone else, and then lie outright, you might want to consider whether you're right in the first place.

Twitter, to its credit (a credit that it must be said it often doesn't deserve), pulled the fake accounts as fast as it could, but not before there were thousands of people who had followed them, and tens of thousands of times that the false messages had been retweeted.  As with most false claims, it's damn hard to fix the damage once the claim is out there, regardless of how many times it's debunked, retracted, or deleted.  Witness the ongoing anti-vaxx idiocy, due largely to Andrew Wakefield, whose "studies" were withdrawn and whose work has been shown to be worthless.  Witness "chemtrails," whose genesis was due to a misquoted number on a Louisiana news broadcast.  Witness the ten thousand (literally) public lies Donald Trump has uttered in the last three years.

Undoing all that would be about as easy as putting toothpaste back into a tube.

As far as why anyone would be such a complete dick as to attack Dr. Bouman, most people are attributing it to sexism -- that the trolls couldn't believe that a woman had made such an achievement, and set out to prove that she'd relied on her male colleagues and then stole their glory.  Sadly, this explanation for the trolls' behavior is entirely plausible.  Despite considerable advances, it's still difficult for women to succeed in science.  Consider the 2017 study that showed teams led by women only receive 7% of the total grant money allocations, and a team led by a woman receives on average 40% of the money that a similar project receives if led by a man.  These figures are appalling, even if you take into account that only 17% of working scientists in physics and engineering are female -- the fields with the lowest diversity.

Which is itself appalling.

So this disgusting episode is yet another reason to be careful about what you believe online.  Double, triple, quadruple-check your sources before you pass along links.  That is especially true if the link supports something you're already inclined to believe; we all fall prey to confirmation bias.

Despite all this, I still think that humanity is, in the majority, good.  But being good means you speak up against the ugly minority who are determined to attack, demean, and degrade others.  Defeating the trolls takes an effort by all of us.  To paraphrase Edmund Burke (the paraphrase is to remove the sexist verbiage, the irony of which does not escape me): "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing."

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The black heart of M87

It's awfully easy to get discouraged lately.

The news seems to go from bad to worse every day.  Government corruption, terrorist attacks both here and overseas, every other news story a testament of the amazing ability of Homo sapiens to treat each other horribly.

So when we have a triumph, we should celebrate it.  Because as Max Ehrmann put it, in his classic poem "Desiderata:" "Many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism...  With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."

We got a lovely example of that a couple of days ago, with the revelation that scientists had amassed enough data from the Event Horizon Telescope project to produce the first-ever photograph of a black hole.  It's at the heart of the massive elliptical galaxy M87, in the constellation of Virgo, and is about 54 million light years away.  With no further ado, here's the photo:

I think the left-hand one -- with less magnification -- is even more amazing, because it shows the black hole in context with its surroundings.  It looks more "real."  But in either case, they're stunning.  The glow comes from matter being sucked into the black hole, being heated up to the point of producing x-rays as a sort of electromagnetic death scream before dropping forever beyond the event horizon.  For the very first time, we're seeing an actual image of one of the most bizarre phenomena in nature -- an object so massive that it warps space into a closed curve, so that even light can't escape.

But even this isn't my favorite image that has come out of this study.

This is:

This is Katie Bouman, the MIT postdoc (soon to be starting as an assistant professor at CalTech) whose algorithm made the black hole image a reality.  Bouman responded to her sudden fame with modesty.  "No one of us could've done it alone," she said.  "It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds."

Which may well be, but no one is questioning her pivotal role in this groundbreaking achievement.  And what I love about the photograph above is that it perfectly captures the joy of doing science -- what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called "the pleasure of finding things out."  We now have a window into a piece of the universe that was invisible to us before, and that ineffable feeling is clearly captured in her expression.

There have already been six papers written about this accomplishment, and that's only the beginning.  I find myself wondering what other obscure and fascinating astronomical phenomena Bouman's algorithm could be used to photograph -- and what we might learn from seeing them for real for the first time.  I also wonder what effect that will have on us ordinary laypeople.  The physicists may be comfortable living in the world of their mathematical models (I heard one physicist friend say, "The models are the reality; everything else is just pretty pictures"), but the rest of us need to be more grounded in order to understand.  So what if we were to see more than an artist's conception of things like pulsars, quasars, gamma-ray bursters, type 1-A supernovae?

Kind of a surfeit of wonder, that would be.  But what a way to be overwhelmed, yes?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)